IN FOREIGN policy, conservatives are adrift.
They disdain the Wilsonian multilateralism of the Clinton administration; they
are tempted by, but so far have resisted, the neoisolationism of Patrick Buchanan;
for now, they lean uncertainly on some version of the conservative "realism"
of Henry Kissinger and his disciples. Thus, in this year's election campaign,
they speak vaguely of replacing Clinton's vacillation with a steady, "adult"
foreign policy under Robert Dole. But Clinton has not vacillated that much recently,
and Dole was reduced a few weeks ago to asserting, in what was heralded as a
major address, that there really are differences in foreign policy between him
and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. But the fault
is not Dole's; in truth, there has been little attempt to set forth the outlines
of a conservative view of the world and America's proper role in it.

Is such an attempt necessary, or even possible?
For the past few years, Americans, from the foreign policy big-thinker to the
man on the street, have assumed it is not. Rather, this is supposed to be a
time for unshouldering the vast responsibilities the United States acquired
at the end of the Second World War and for concentrating its energies at home.
The collapse of the Soviet Empire has made possible a "return to normalcy"
in American foreign and defense policy, allowing the adoption of a more limited
definition of the national interest, with a commensurate reduction in overseas
involvement and defense spending.

Republicans and conservatives at first tended
to be wary of this new post-Cold War consensus. But they joined it rapidly after
1992, in the wake of the defeat of the quintessential "foreign policy president"
by a candidate who promised to focus "like a laser" on the domestic
economy. Now conservatives tailor their foreign and defense policies to fit
the presumed new political reality: an American public that is indifferent,
if not hostile, to foreign policy and commitments abroad, more interested in
balancing the budget than in leading the world, and more intent on cashing in
the "peace dividend" than on spending to deter and fight future wars.
Most conservatives have chosen to acquiesce in rather than challenge this public
mood.

In a way, the current situation is reminiscent
of the mid-1970s. But Ronald Reagan mounted a bold challenge to the tepid consensus
of that era  a consensus that favored accommodation to and coexistence
with the Soviet Union, accepted the inevitability of America's declining power,
and considered any change in the status quo either too frightening or too expensive.
Proposing a controversial vision of ideological and strategic victory over the
forces of international communism, Reagan called for an end to complacency in
the face of the Soviet threat, large increases in defense spending, resistance
to communist advances in the Third World, and greater moral clarity and purpose
in U.S. foreign policy. He championed American exceptionalism when it was deeply
unfashionable. Perhaps most significant, he refused to accept the limits on
American power imposed by the domestic political realities that others assumed
were fixed.

Many smart people regarded Reagan with scorn
or alarm. Liberal Democrats still reeling from the Vietnam War were, of course,
appalled by his zealotry. So were many of Reagan's fellow Republicans, especially
the Kissingerian realists then dominant in foreign affairs. Reagan declared
war on his own party, took on Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential
nomination (primarily over issues of foreign policy), and trained his guns on
Kissinger, whose stewardship of U.S. foreign policy, he charged, had "coincided
precisely with the loss of U.S. military supremacy." Although Reagan lost
the battle to unseat Ford, he won the fight at the Republican convention for
a platform plank on "morality in foreign policy." Ultimately, he succeeded
in transforming the Republican party, the conservative movement in America,
and, after his election to the presidency in 1980, the country and the world.

BENEVOLENT HEGEMONY

TWENTY YEARS later, it is time once again to
challenge an indifferent America and a confused American conservatism. Today's
lukewarm consensus about America's reduced role in a post-Cold War world is
wrong. Conservatives should not accede to it; it is bad for the country and,
incidentally, bad for conservatism. Conservatives will not be able to govern
America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's
international role.

What should that role be? Benevolent global
hegemony. Having defeated the "evil empire," the United States enjoys
strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign
policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening
America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing
up for its principles around the world.

The aspiration to benevolent hegemony might
strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect. But a hegemon is nothing
more or less than a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all
others in its domain. That is America's position in the world today. The leaders
of Russia and China understand this. At their April summit meeting, Boris Yeltsin
and Jiang Zemin joined in denouncing "hegemonism" in the post-Cold
War world. They meant this as a complaint about the United States. It should
be taken as a compliment and a guide to action.

Consider the events of just the past six months,
a period that few observers would consider remarkable for its drama on the world
stage. In East Asia, the carrier task forces of the U.S. Seventh Fleet helped
deter Chinese aggression against democratic Taiwan, and the 35,000 American
troops stationed in South Korea helped deter a possible invasion by the rulers
in Pyongyang. In Europe, the United States sent 20,000 ground troops to implement
a peace agreement in the former Yugoslavia, maintained 100,000 in Western Europe
as a symbolic commitment to European stability and security, and intervened
diplomatically to prevent the escalation of a conflict between Greece and Turkey.
In the Middle East, the United States maintained the deployment of thousands
of soldiers and a strong naval presence in the Persian Gulf region to deter
possible aggression by Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Islamic fundamentalist regime
in Iran, and it mediated in the conflict between Israel and Syria in Lebanon.
In the Western Hemisphere, the United States completed the withdrawal of 15,000
soldiers after restoring a semblance of democratic government in Haiti and,
almost without public notice, prevented a military coup in Paraguay. In Africa,
a U.S. expeditionary force rescued Americans and others trapped in the Liberian
civil conflict.

These were just the most visible American actions
of the past six months, and just those of a military or diplomatic nature. During
the same period, the United States made a thousand decisions in international
economic forums, both as a government and as an amalgam of large corporations
and individual entrepreneurs, that shaped the lives and fortunes of billions
around the globe. America influenced both the external and internal behavior
of other countries through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Through the United Nations, it maintained sanctions on rogue states such as
Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Through aid programs, the United States tried to shore
up friendly democratic regimes in developing nations. The enormous web of the
global economic system, with the United States at the center, combined with
the pervasive influence of American ideas and culture, allowed Americans to
wield influence in many other ways of which they were entirely unconscious.
The simple truth of this era was stated last year by a Serb leader trying to
explain Slobodan Milosevic's decision to finally seek rapprochement with Washington.
"As a pragmatist," the Serbian politician said, "Milosevic knows
that all satellites of the United States are in a better position than those
that are not satellites."

And America's allies are in a better position
than those who are not its allies. Most of the world's major powers welcome
U.S. global involvement and prefer America's benevolent hegemony to the alternatives.
Instead of having to compete for dominant global influence with many other powers,
therefore, the United States finds both the Europeans and the Japanese -- after
the United States, the two most powerful forces in the world -- supportive of
its world leadership role. Those who anticipated the dissolution of these alliances
once the common threat of the Soviet Union disappeared have been proved wrong.
The principal concern of America's allies these days is not that it will be
too dominant but that it will withdraw.

Somehow most Americans have failed to notice
that they have never had it so good. They have never lived in a world more conducive
to their fundamental interests in a liberal international order, the spread
of freedom and democratic governance, an international economic system of free-market
capitalism and free trade, and the security of Americans not only to live within
their own borders but to travel and do business safely and without encumbrance
almost anywhere in the world. Americans have taken these remarkable benefits
of the post-Cold War era for granted, partly because it has all seemed so easy.
Despite misguided warnings of imperial overstretch, the United States has so
far exercised its hegemony without any noticeable strain, and it has done so
despite the fact that Americans appear to be in a more insular mood than at
any time since before the Second World War. The events of the last six months
have excited no particular interest among Americans and, indeed, seem to have
been regarded with the same routine indifference as breathing and eating.

And that is the problem. The most difficult
thing to preserve is that which does not appear to need preserving. The dominant
strategic and ideological position the United States now enjoys is the product
of foreign policies and defense strategies that are no longer being pursued.
Americans have come to take the fruits of their hegemonic power for granted.
During the Cold War, the strategies of deterrence and containment worked so
well in checking the ambitions of America's adversaries that many American liberals
denied that our adversaries had ambitions or even, for that matter, that America
had adversaries. Today the lack of a visible threat to U.S. vital interests
or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material
and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based.
They do not notice that potential challengers are deterred before even contemplating
confrontation by their overwhelming power and influence.

The ubiquitous post-Cold War question -- where
is the threat? -- is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American
security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the
United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony
is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international
order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve
that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the
United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and
moral confidence.

THREE IMPERATIVES

SETTING FORTH the broad outlines of such a
foreign policy is more important for the moment than deciding the best way to
handle all the individual issues that have preoccupied U.S. policymakers and
analysts. Whether or not the United States continues to grant most-favored-nation
status to China is less important than whether it has an overall strategy for
containing, influencing, and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing.
Whether NATO expands this year or five years from now is less important than
whether NATO remains strong, active, cohesive, and under decisive American leadership.
Whether America builds 20 B-2 bombers or 3 is less important than giving its
military planners enough money to make intelligent choices that are driven more
by strategic than by budget requirements. But it is clear that a neo-Reaganite
foreign policy would have several implications.

The defense budget. Republicans declared
victory last year when they added $ 7 billion to President Clinton's defense
budget. But the hard truth is that Washington -- now spending about $ 260 billion
per year on defense -- probably needs to spend about $ 60-$ 80 billion more
each year in order to preserve America's role as global hegemon. The United
States currently devotes about three percent of its GNP to defense. U.S. defense
planners, who must make guesses about a future that is impossible to predict
with confidence, are increasingly being forced to place all their chips on one
guess or another. They are being asked to predict whether the future is likely
to bring more conflicts like the Gulf War or peacekeeping operations like those
in Bosnia and Haiti, or more great-power confrontations similar to the Cold
War. The best answer to these questions is: who can tell? The odds are that
in the coming decades America may face all these kinds of conflict, as well
as some that have yet to be imagined.

For the past few years, American military supremacy
has been living off a legacy, specifically, the legacy of Ronald Reagan. As
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell once noted,
it was Reagan's military, built in the 1980s to deter the Soviet Union, that
won the war against Iraq. No serious analyst of American military capabilities
today doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America's
responsibilities to itself and to world peace. The United States may no longer
have the wherewithal to defend against threats to America's vital interests
in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, much less to extend America's current
global preeminence well into the future.

The current readiness of U.S. forces is in
decline, but so is their ability to maintain an advantage in high-technology
weapons over the coming decades. In the search for some way to meet extensive
strategic requirements with inadequate resources, defense planners have engaged
in strategic fratricide. Those who favor current readiness have been pitted
against those who favor high-tech research and development; those who favor
maintaining American forward deployment at bases around the world have been
arrayed against those who insist that for the sake of economizing the job be
accomplished at long range without bases. The military is forced to choose between
army combat divisions and the next generation of bombers, between lift capacities
and force projection, between short-range and long-range deterrence. Constructing
a military force appropriate to a nation's commitments and its resources is
never an easy task, and there are always limits that compel difficult choices.
But today's limits are far too severe; the choices they compel are too dramatic;
and because military strategy and planning are far from exact sciences, the
United States is dangerously cutting its margin for error.

The defense budget crisis is now at hand. Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs General John Shalikashvili has complained that the weapons
procurement budget has been reduced to perilously low levels, and he has understated
the problem. Since 1985, the research and development budget has been cut by
57 percent; the procurement budget has been cut 71 percent. Both the Clinton
administration and the Republican Congress have achieved budget savings over
the next few years by pushing necessary procurement decisions into the next
century. The Clinton administration's so-called "Bottom-Up Review"
of U.S. defense strategy has been rightly dismissed by Democrats like Senate
Armed Services Committee member Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) as "already
inadequate to the present and certainly to the future." Both the General
Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office have projected a shortfall
of $ 50 billion to $ 100 billion over the next five years in funding just for
existing force levels and procurement plans.

These shortfalls do not even take into account
the development of new weapons, like a missile defense system capable of protecting
American territory against missiles launched from rogue states such as North
Korea or shielding, say, Los Angeles from nuclear intimidation by the Chinese
during the next crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Deployment of such a system could
cost more than $ 10 billion a year.

Add together the needed increases in the procurement
budget called for by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the justifiable increases
in funding for existing forces to make up the shortfalls identified by the GAO
and the CBO, and it becomes obvious that an increase in defense spending by
$ 60 billion to $ 80 billion is not a radical proposal. It is simply what the
United States will require to keep the peace and defend its interests over the
coming decades. If this number sounds like a budget-buster, it should not. Today,
defense spending is less than 20 percent of the total federal budget. In 1962,
before the Vietnam War, defense spending ran at almost 50 percent of the overall
budget. In 1978, before the Carter-Reagan defense buildup, it was about 23 percent.
Increases of the size required to pursue a neo-Reaganite foreign policy today
would require returning to about that level of defense spending -- still less
than one-quarter of the federal budget.

These days, some critics complain about the
fact that the United States spends more on defense than the next six major powers
combined. But the enormous disparity between U.S. military strength and that
of any potential challenger is a good thing for America and the world. After
all, America's world role is entirely different from that of the other powers.
The more Washington is able to make clear that it is futile to compete with
American power, either in size of forces or in technological capabilities, the
less chance there is that countries like China or Iran will entertain ambitions
of upsetting the present world order. And that means the United States will
be able to save money in the long run, for it is much cheaper to deter a war
than to fight one. Americans should be glad that their defense capabilities
are as great as the next six powers combined. Indeed, they may even want to
enshrine this disparity in U.S. defense strategy. Great Britain in the late
19th century maintained a "two-power standard" for its navy, insisting
that at all times the British navy should be as large as the next two naval
powers combined, whoever they might be. Perhaps the United States should inaugurate
such a two- (or three-, or four-) power standard of its own, which would preserve
its military supremacy regardless of the near-term global threats.

Citizen involvement. A gap is growing,
meanwhile, between America's professional military, uncomfortable with some
of the missions that the new American role requires, and a civilian population
increasingly unaware of or indifferent to the importance of its military's efforts
abroad. U.S. military leaders harbor justifiable suspicions that while they
serve as a kind of foreign legion, doing the hard work of American-style "empire
management," American civilians at home, preoccupied with the distribution
of tax breaks and government benefits, will not come to their support when the
going gets tough. Weak political leadership and a poor job of educating the
citizenry to the responsibilities of global hegemony have created an increasingly
distinct and alienated military culture. Ask any mechanic or mess boy on an
aircraft carrier why he is patrolling the oceans, and he can give a more sophisticated
explanation of power projection than 99 percent of American college graduates.
It is foolish to imagine that the United States can lead the world effectively
while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is
involved, in any real way, with its international mission.

The president and other political leaders can
take steps to close the growing separation of civilian and military cultures
in our society. They can remind civilians of the sacrifices being made by U.S.
forces overseas and explain what those sacrifices are for. A clear statement
of America's global mission can help the public understand why U.S. troops are
deployed overseas and can help reassure military leaders of public support in
difficult circumstances. It could also lay the groundwork for reasserting more
comprehensive civilian control over the military.

There could be further efforts to involve more
citizens in military service. Perhaps the United States has reached the point
where a return to the draft is not feasible because of the high degree of professionalization
of the military services. But there are other ways to lower the barriers between
civilian and military life. Expanded forms of reserve service could give many
more Americans experience of the military and an appreciation of military virtues.
Conservatives preach that citizenship is not only about rights but also about
responsibilities. There is no more profound responsibility than the defense
of the nation and its principles.

Moral clarity. Finally, American foreign
policy should be informed with a clear moral purpose, based on the understanding
that its moral goals and its fundamental national interests are almost always
in harmony. The United States achieved its present position of strength not
by practicing a foreign policy of live and let live, nor by passively waiting
for threats to arise, but by actively promoting American principles of governance
abroad -- democracy, free markets, respect for liberty. During the Reagan years,
the United States pressed for changes in right-wing and left-wing dictatorships
alike, among both friends and foes -- in the Philippines, South Korea, Eastern
Europe and even the Soviet Union. The purpose was not Wilsonian idealistic whimsy.
The policy of putting pressure on authoritarian and totalitarian regimes had
practical aims and, in the end, delivered strategic benefits. Support for American
principles around the world can be sustained only by the continuing exertion
of American influence. Some of that influence comes from the aid provided to
friendly regimes that are trying to carry out democratic and free market reforms.
However strong the case for reform of foreign aid programs, such programs deserve
to be maintained as a useful way of exerting American influence abroad. And
sometimes that means not just supporting U.S. friends and gently pressuring
other nations but actively pursuing policies in Iran, Cuba, or China, for instance
-- ultimately intended to bring about a change of regime. In any case, the United
States should not blindly "do business" with every nation, no matter
its regime. Armand Hammerism should not be a tenet of conservative foreign policy.

FROM NSC-68 TO 1996

THIS SWEEPING, neo-Reaganite foreign policy
agenda may seem ambitious for these tepid times. Politicians in both parties
will protest that the American people will not support the burdens of such a
policy. There are two answers to this criticism.

First, it is already clear that, on the present
course, Washington will find it increasingly impossible to fulfill even the
less ambitious foreign policies of the realists, including the defense of so-called
"vital" interests in Europe and Asia. Without a broad, sustaining
foreign policy vision, the American people will be inclined to withdraw from
the world and will lose sight of their abiding interest in vigorous world leadership.
Without a sense of mission, they will seek deeper and deeper cuts in the defense
and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of U.S. hegemony.

Consider what has happened in only the past
few years. Ronald Reagan's exceptionalist appeal did not survive the presidency
of George Bush, where self-proclaimed pragmatists like James Baker found it
easier to justify the Gulf War to the American people in terms of "jobs"
than as a defense of a world order shaped to suit American interests and principles.
Then, having discarded the overarching Reaganite vision that had sustained a
globally active foreign policy through the last decade of the Cold War, the
Bush administration in 1992 saw its own prodigious foreign policy successes
swept into the dustbin by Clinton political adviser James Carville's campaign
logic: "It's the economy, stupid." By the time conservatives took
their seats as the congressional opposition in 1993, they had abandoned not
only Reaganism but to some degree foreign policy itself.

Now the common wisdom holds that Dole's solid
victory over Buchanan in the primaries constituted a triumphant reassertion
of conservative internationalism over neoisolationism. But the common wisdom
may prove wrong. On the stump during the Republican primaries this year, what
little passion and energy there was on foreign policy issues came from Buchanan
and his followers. Over the past four years Buchanan's fiery "America First"
rhetoric has filled the vacuum among conservatives created by the abandonment
of Reagan's very different kind of patriotic mission. It is now an open question
how long the beleaguered conservative realists will be able to resist the combined
assault of Buchanan's "isolationism of the heart" and the Republican
budget hawks on Capitol Hill.

History also shows, however, that the American
people can be summoned to meet the challenges of global leadership if statesmen
make the case loudly, cogently, and persistently. As troubles arise and the
need to act becomes clear, those who have laid the foundation for a necessary
shift in policy have a chance to lead Americans onto a new course. In 1950,
Paul Nitze and other Truman administration officials drafted the famous planning
document NSC-68, a call for an all-out effort to meet the Soviet challenge that
included a full-scale ideological confrontation and massive increases in defense
spending. At first, their proposals languished. President Truman, worried about
angering a hostile, budget-conscious Congress and an American public which was
enjoying an era of peace and prosperity, for months refused to approve the defense
spending proposals. It took the North Korean invasion of South Korea to allow
the administration to rally support for the prescriptions of NSC-68. Before
the Korean War, American politicians were fighting over whether the defense
budget ought to be $ 15 billion or $ 16 billion; most believed more defense
spending would bankrupt the nation. The next year, the defense budget was over
$ 50 billion.

A similar sequence of events unfolded in the
1970s. When Reagan and the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats began sounding
the alarm about the Soviet danger, the American public was not ready to listen.
Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages
in Iran. By the time Jimmy Carter professed to have learned more about the Soviet
Union than he had ever known before, Reagan and his fellow conservatives in
both parties had laid the intellectual foundation for the military buildup of
the 1980s.

AN ELEVATED PATRIOTISM

IN THEORY, either party could lay the groundwork
for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy over the next decade. The Democrats, after
all, led the nation to assume its new global responsibilities in the late 1940s
and early 1950s under President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
It is unlikely, however, that they are prepared to pursue such a course today.
Republicans may have lost their way in the last few years, but the Democrats
are still recovering from their post-Vietnam trauma of two decades ago. President
Clinton has proved a better manager of foreign policy than many expected, but
he has not been up to the larger task of preparing and inspiring the nation
to embrace the role of global leadership. He, too, has tailored his internationalist
activism to fit the constraints of a popular mood that White House pollsters
believe is disinclined to sacrifice blood and treasure in the name of overseas
commitments. His Pentagon officials talk more about exit strategies than about
national objectives. His administration has promised global leadership on the
cheap, refusing to seek the levels of defense spending needed to meet the broad
goals it claims to want to achieve in the world. Even Clinton's boldest overseas
adventures, in Bosnia and Haiti, have come only after strenuous and prolonged
efforts to avoid intervention.

Republicans are surely the genuine heirs to
the Reagan tradition. The 1994 election is often said to have represented one
last victory for Ronald Reagan's domestic agenda. But Reagan's earlier successes
rested as much on foreign as on domestic policy. Over the long term, victory
for American conservatives depends on recapturing the spirit of Reagan's foreign
policy as well. Indeed, American conservatism cannot govern by domestic policy
alone. In the 1990s conservatives have built their agenda on two pillars of
Reaganism: relimiting government to curtail the most intrusive and counterproductive
aspects of the modern welfare state, and reversing the widespread collapse of
morals and standards in American society. But it is hard to imagine conservatives
achieving a lasting political realignment in this country without the third
pillar: a coherent set of foreign policy principles that at least bear some
resemblance to those propounded by Reagan. The remoralization of America at
home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy. For
both follow from Americans' belief that the principles of the Declaration of
Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal,
enduring, "self-evident" truths. That has been, after all, the main
point of the conservatives' war against a relativistic multiculturalism. For
conservatives to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the
Western tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American
principles abroad, is an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart
of conservatism.

Conservatives these days succumb easily to
the charming old metaphor of the United States as a "city on a hill."
They hark back, as George Kennan did in these pages not long ago, to the admonition
of John Quincy Adams that America ought not go "abroad in search of monsters
to destroy." But why not? The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose,
ravaging and pillaging to their hearts' content, as Americans stand by and watch.
What may have been wise counsel in 1823, when America was a small, isolated
power in a world of European giants, is no longer so, when America is the giant.
Because America has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world's monsters,
most of which can be found without much searching, and because the responsibility
for the peace and security of the international order rests so heavily on America's
shoulders, a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in
practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor.

And more is at stake than honor. Without a
broader, more enlightened understanding of America's interests, conservatism
will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan's "America
First," where the appeal to narrow stir-interest masks a deeper form of
stir-loathing. A true "conservatism of the heart" ought to emphasize
both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national
engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense
of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy -- and
American conservatism in recent years. George Kennan was right 50 years ago
in his famous "X" article: the American people ought to feel a "certain
gratitude to a Providence, which by providing [them] with this implacable challenge,
has made their entire security as a nation dependent on pulling themselves together
and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history
plainly intended them to bear." This is as true today -- if less obviously
so -- as it was at the beginning of the Cold War.

A neo-Reaganite foreign policy would be good
for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world. It is worth recalling
that the most successful Republican presidents of this century, Theodore Roosevelt
and Ronald Reagan, both inspired Americans to assume cheerfully the new international
responsibilities that went with increased power and influence. Both celebrated
American exceptionalism. Both made Americans proud of their leading role in
world affairs. Deprived of the support of an elevated patriotism, bereft of
the ability to appeal to national honor, conservatives will ultimately fail
in their effort to govern America. And Americans will fail in their responsibility
to lead the world.